2K and Firaxis Announced 'Sid Meier's Starships'

Starships is billed as a turn-based, adventure-driven interstellar strategy game scheduled for release in early 2015 and will hit PC, Mac, and iPad. It may sound a little different from the average Civilization experience, but Firaxis seems enthusiastic that the game will deliver all fans want.

If Civilization: Beyond Earth was Firaxis’ answer to interplanetary colonization, Starships appears to be their answer to interplanetary protection. Now that players have secured new home planets in Beyond Earth, Starships asks them to form federations and defend those planets from new enemies in a real-time strategy experience, while also exploring new planets and investigating new technologies in the Civilization tradition.

Every Starships campaign will present players with a “distinctive galactic strategy map of world with dynamically generated tactical combat missions,” meaning that replay value will be high. We don’t know much about how Starships will try to deliver those distinct maps or missions, but for now the prospect sounds intriguing.

Firaxis Games’ co-founder Sid Meier, whose name also happens to be on the game, says that Starships will tie directly into Civilization: Beyond Earth, but has yet to detail exactly how. We assume that players’ colonized planets will play a factor in the experience, but that’s just a rough guess.

For our money, Starships sounds like a smart spin-off idea for Firaxis and one that could satisfy players’ needs for interplanetary ship battles. Games like Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous are attempting micro looks at the concept, but Starships appears to be going macro. But not as macro, or as involved, as something like EVE: Online…we hope.

Curious gamers who also happen to live in the Southwest region of the United States can hear more about Starships at the inaugural PAX South later this month. There, Sid Meier will give a talk on Starships and likely unveil more about the game’s approach. But even if you can’t attend, rest assured that Game Rant will feed you all the pertinent news about Starships’ development.

What do you think of Sid Meier’s Starships? Does it sound like a strategy game that interests you?